In a recent newsletter, from Monday 24th November 2025, Mark featured an item about levels of CO2 in the atmosphere which was contributed by Mike Kearsley. Mr Kearsley sounds like he's been swayed by various sources of climate change disinformation. Mike asked us to specify what the optimum level of CO2 in the atmosphere should be.

Recently I was listening to the Inner Cosmos podcast, which explores the human brain from a neuroscience perspective. One of the episodes was about intuition, and the host was interviewing an Australian scientist, Joel Pearson, about intuition. During the interview, the scientist mentioned Intuitive Eating. This was a new term for me, so I thought I'd look it up and see what it was all about.

Most kiwis will be aware that this coming Friday is a statutory holiday, the recently introduced Matariki day - being on Friday June 28th.

When I first became interested in skepticism back in the 90s, I started finding communities on the internet (little did I know that we had our own skeptical organisation here in Aotearoa/New Zealand), and one of the prominent people I encountered was Michael Shermer.

Forgive me this short item, as it's been a pretty busy weekend. I had good intentions, but today my wife and I decided that we needed some more shelving space in our garage. I'd mentioned putting in another shelf below one that I had already installed some time ago, but she managed to convince me that it would be better to extend the Elfa wire rack system that we already have in our garage. What was intended to be a half hour job turned into a couple of visits to Mitre 10, and several hours of moving stuff around and installing everything. Still, we're very pleased with the result and we now have considerably more space to store various garage essentials.

Over this past weekend, we've been treated to beautiful displays in the sky at night, courtesy of space weather, and the sun ejecting some mass towards us - known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the demise of RCR - Reality Check Radio, Voices for Freedom's media outlet that specialises in content for conspiracy theorists.

This past Tuesday the NZ internet was confronted with the sad news that Reality Check Radio - RCR as it's known - was “off the air”. On Tuesday morning, arriving in my mailbox that I use to monitor the thing, came this news:

It's April First, as I write this, which is normally a day where various pranks are played in the name of April Fool's Day. A quick look at the online newspapers doesn't reveal any obvious stories, and it would appear that, in the age of the internet, the day has lost its usefulness.

With the encouragement of Mark and Bronwyn from the NZ Skeptics committee, I attended a meeting about Effective Altruism at Rationalist House in Auckland on the evening of 13th March.

In the news this past week has been the announcement of the potential closing of Newshub at the end of June this year.

You may or may not have heard the term “crank magnetism”. I had heard of the term, but I'd completely misunderstood its meaning. Yes, this item is going to be a bit of a laugh at myself as much as anything!

Making the news this past week was Elon Musk's announcement that his company, Neuralink, has performed its first implantation of their experimental Brain Computer Interface device (BCI) into a human.

I recently watched a debate on YouTube between Dr. Zachery Ardern and Stephen Woodford.

I recently read David McRaney's book (on Kindle, from Amazon) on the recommendation of Melanie Trecek-King - one of our international guests at last year's conference in Dunedin. I was interested to read the book to gain insights into how to change peoples' minds about things that they're wrong about - or perhaps change my own mind about things I'm wrong about!

You'll no doubt have heard about the supposed revelations of COVID vaccine deaths recently revealed by an IT employee of Te Whatu Ora - a government agency - the MInistry of Health.

As it's an election year this year, there's been no lack of misinformation and nonsense being pushed at New Zealanders. Our runner up for the Bent Spoon award this year decided, apparently reluctantly, to start a new political party, called NZ Loyal. Liz Gunn, once a high-profile TV presenter, turned herself into a political leader and asked the conspiracy theorists of New Zealand to vote for her. Worryingly, given some of her extreme views, she received 1.2% of all votes, and she's already preparing her party for the next election. Next time round she might actually manage to submit the paperwork properly and have more than two candidates standing for election. We will be keeping a close eye on her.

As mentioned above, during the Sunday lunchtime of the conference we'll be holding our Annual General Meeting. If you're a member of NZ Skeptics you can come along (even if you're not attending the conference) and hear all about our business. We'll also be attempting to run a livestream of the meeting in case you can't attend in person.

I've recently become aware of a controversy surrounding the discovery of Homo naledi, which was the subject of a Netflix documentary film: Unknown: Cave of Bones

And speaking of documentaries, there's recently been not one, but two short documentary series on streaming platforms about the Twin Flames Universe cult, each with three episodes.

I have a feeling we've written about Ārepa before, but as a refresher, it's a kiwi brand that produces “health drink” products that claims to make brains work better.

We've reported previously on Liz Gunn, the former TV presenter, now turned conspiracy theorist, who was the leader of the NZ Loyal political party. Her party received just 1.2% of the party vote, therefore denying their representation in parliament.

As I've written before, we occasionally get people emailing the NZ Skeptics committee with their various “theories” about how things work.

There are plenty of scam wellness products on the market, but the latest one to catch my attention is a fancy water bottle called LumiVitae CellPower. You can pre-order your very own in either Anthracite Gray or Champagne Gold for the bargain price of $845.

Over the past week or two, I've been having email conversations with a person from the other side of the skeptical fence. This person I'll refer to as Mark - which is his real name, but I'll not give any more information about him. (By the way, our skeptical newsletter writer Mark Honeychurch has sworn he's not running some elaborate joke on me!)

There's a few things I'd like to promote this week.

There was a recent RNZ interview done as part of their Expert Feature series, which runs on Monday afternoons with host Jesse Mulligan.

We certainly live in exciting times. There's been recent news about some potentially exciting discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Last week we saw a psychic spat between Sue Nicholson and Kelvin Cruickshank. These two alleged psychic mediums were once co-performers on the awful Sensing Murder TV show - you know the one that didn't solve any murders, despite running for 47 episodes over six seasons.

I might be behind the times (I usually am!) but this week, while doing some YouTube surfing, I came across a video on Fractal Wood Burning - specifically warning of the dangers of it. (And, of course, the YouTube algorithm, which I liken to a toddler, has now filled my page with other videos like it!)

At the prompting of Mark and Bronwyn during last week's podcast episode, I attended a church meeting last evening. This was an event called “Lean In: Christianity and Politics - Meet the Candidates”. This was held at the Windsor Park Baptist Church - only a few kilometres away from my home. The venue itself was pretty un-chuchlike, in that it was previously the Windsor Park Tavern.

The Therapeutic Products Act is the most significant shift in the regulation of medicines, medical devices and natural health products in almost 40 years. It will replace the Medicines Act 1981 and Dietary Supplements Regulations 1985 with a new regulatory regime.

This weekend the Yeah… Nah! Podcast crew - that is me, Mark and Bronwyn recorded an interview with Melanie Trecek-King who is one of our international guests at our conference in November. (You can get tickets here!) We've released the podcast as a bonus episode.

One of our members emailed us last week asking about a climate change denier's blog article.

OK, so another item related to climate change. I've recently started listening to an entertaining podcast - The Climate Denier's Playbook.

I've mentioned the Voices for Freedom bunch a few times in this newsletter, but looking at the latest Reality Check Radio had me amused. From their email:

It's been a little while since I've checked in on the antics of the Voices for Freedom bunch, but, checking my email I have set up to monitor their comms, and from others who do the same, there's been a bit of activity lately.

Most kiwis will be aware that it's election year, with the general election only a few months away, scheduled for Saturday 14th October.

Last Sunday evening, my wife and I had the pleasure of attending the world premiere of Ms. Information at the Auckland International Film Festival. OK, that sounds a little more grandiose than it was - we purchased tickets like most other people in the audience.

As I've commented in previous issues of the newsletter, I listen to the excellent podcast Be Reasonable, hosted by Michael Marshall (Marsh, as he's colloquially known). In the latest episode (#083, released Wednesday 26th July), he interviewed Nyjon Eccles, a “functional medicine” doctor from the UK. He's a promoter of thermography, which is an Infra-red imaging technique used to scan women's breasts in an attempt to screen for differences in temperature from which, it is alleged, they can infer a possible tumour - that is, breast cancer.

As I mentioned in my introduction, my wife Susan and I have been on a month-long holiday in the US and Canada. I thought I'd give a few of the highlights which relate to skepticism that we encountered on our trip.

As I talked about in my introduction, I managed to catch an episode of Black Mirror on Netflix - an episode titled Joan is Awful. I'm going to discuss various plot elements, so SPOILER ALERT!

So, I'm a Diet Coke drinker. I don't drink hot drinks, and never have for my whole life. At least from my teenage years, when hot drinks were introduced in the form of tea, I always found them too hot and would burn my mouth. So, at least for the past few decades, I've consumed a reasonable* amount of Diet Coke.

No doubt everybody knows about the news of late last week about the indictment of former US president Donald Trump on various federal charges relating to his wilful retention of classified documents, hiding documents, and obstruction of justice. In my opinion, this is a cause for celebration, that they've finally built a case that they can prosecute.

The last time I wrote the newsletter, I announced our NZ Skeptics conference happening in Dunedin on the weekend of 24th - 26th November, at Taito Otago Settlers Museum.

A few weeks back I published an item that reviewed the book A Manual for Creating Atheists, by Peter Boghossian.

We've ragged on “apostle” Brian Tamaki many times in the past, but this week has seen a new crusade emerge.

As many readers will know, NZ Skeptics hold an annual conference. We hold these in various locations around the country, and this year we're holding it in Dunedin.

In the past, we've covered the Disinformation Dozen - a group of twelve people internationally who were/are responsible for promoting a lot of mis- and disinformation, who rose to particular prominence during the peak of the Covid pandemic.

You'd have to have been living under a rock to not have noticed the rise of AI (artificial intelligence) technology recently. It seems that hardly a day goes by without some new announcement about it, or some controversy caused by it.